Searing and extremely personal essays from the heart of working-class America, shot through with the darkest elements the country can manifest - cults, homelessness and hunger - while discovering light and humour in unexpected corners.

As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the US Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe - to Germany, Japan, Texas, Chile - but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond 'The Family'.

Along the way, she's loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. She's taken pilgrimages to the sights of her youth, been kept in solitary confinement, dated a lot of women, dabbled in drugs and eventually found herself as what she always wanted to be: a writer. Here, as she sweeps through the underbelly of America - relying on friends, family and strangers alike - she begins to excavate a new identity even as her past continues to trail her and colour her world, relationships and perceptions of self.

At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future.